international conferences

For the 2021 Conference, SWPACA is going virtual! Due to concerns regarding COVID-19, we will be holding our annual conference completely online this year. We hope you will join us for exciting papers, discussions, and the experience you’ve come to expect from Southwest.

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 42nd annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

We inhabit a post-critical moment. In literary and cultural studies, the post-critical turn has yielded new modes of reading, while galvanizing new efforts to think beyond—challenging or perhaps circumventing altogether—the limits of critique. These efforts are not limited, however, to the fields of literary and cultural studies; they track suggestively with new tendencies in contemporary philosophy, namely “New Realism” and its polemic antagonism towards the (loosely branded) legacy of critical theory, which has arguably held a theoretical monopoly in spheres of the humanities not taken with the scientific worldview.

Call for Participants:

Syncopation, Synchrony, and the Art of Listening to Others

The Existential Psychology Group with the Performance Philosophy International Network seeks participants to create a Key Group for the 5th biennial Performance Philosophy conference, which will be held in Helsinki, Finland, from June 9-12, 2021.

The Performance Philosophy network aims to create a non-hierarchical and inclusive conference. Instead of individual keynote speakers, the conference invites proposals from key groups.

Literature in France has always had the potential to become a form of popular entertainment. However, what delighted families in La Bibliothèque Bleue has been forgotten or classified as literary “classics.” But popular literature, or “genre literature,” is more recent. Born in 19th-century newspapers when writers like Méry, Balzac, or Sue published their novels in serial form, its most emblematic writer is Alexandre Dumas. Unlike conventional works, where historical characters are magnified (epic tales) or relegated to the background (La Princesse de Clèves), Dumas’ novels staged characters who marked the history of France.

Lucerne Master Classes offer doctoral students from Switzerland and from abroad an intensive exchange with internationally renowned researchers. Selected doctoral students will receive the opportunity to present their work to the other participants and to discuss it with the guest expert.

The Scholar

What is boredom and why do we feel bored? Recently, research on boredom has gained momentum in the scientific community, particularly in neuroscience and clinical psychology, where the symptoms of boredom and the behavioral patterns of the bored person are scrutinized (i.e. Boredomlab).

The SWCA Board is excited to announce that the 2021 Southeastern Writing Center Association conference will be held fully online. Join us Feb. 11-13, 2021, to discuss the transformations writing center professionals and the field undertake during times of crisis and trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, social unrest, natural disasters, and significant changes in the structure and leadership of higher education have greatly accelerated the pace of these changes and prompted all of us in the writing center field to reconsider many aspects of our approaches to writing center work and everyday operations. Writing center professionals are called not just to react, but to proactively transform their identities, missions, and services.

Poverty: Interpreting the World’s Dividing Line
International Conference

(Due to the high number of proposals we added one more day-Sunday, 25 Oct.)

Thematic Approach

Date of online conference: 13 – 14 May 2021 

Deadline for submissions: 1 December 2020

Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) probably wrote more words than any other writer in the eighteenth century. This has often been overlooked because the words were not always his own. Smollett laboured over vast works of compilation, including historical works, reviews, magazines, translations and compendiums. Even his novels – which sit a little awkwardly in the stories that have been told about the rise of the novel – embraced a similar practice. As a result, Smollett has never been quite able to achieve the reputation which he rightly deserves – that is, as one of the great literary figures of the mid-eighteenth century.

Our website:https://www.inconference.info/Scientific Committee:Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, PolandProfessor Polina Golovátina-Mora – Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Colombia ABOUT CONFERENCE: In the time when human rights are violated on a regular basis, violence triumphs, and feeble democracies ever more often back down before authoritarian rule, there obviously arises the need to reflect on the possible ways of counteracting such phenomena. Our interdisciplinary conference is intended as a fitting opportunity for this reflection.

Body Memory and the UnconsciousOnline Conference and Workshop12-13 December 2020London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Does the body remember what the mind tries to forget? The psychoanalytic tradition grew out of Sigmund Freud's interest in hysteria, and the body's capacity to record painful events in the guise of psychosomatic symptoms. The painful narrative that becomes 'unspeakable' gains potency as it roams around the body, possessing various parts of us. Instead of a wandering womb (originally believed to be the cause of hysteria), it is the banished signifier that wanders, seeking expression.

This seminar invites papers that interrogate the terms under which contemporary interactions between the 'Self' and the 'Other' take place on digital platforms. It deconstructs the binary of the ‘home’ and the ‘world’ and the 'First World' and 'Third World' by analyzing new cultural mobilities and power structures of globalized, outsourced, and work-from-home economies. Can technology produce reciprocal tolerance between different nations and cultures without the need for physical travel? Can it create de-territorialized spaces of desire, friendship, and xenophilia within the very borders of the ‘home’? Does it merely afford an illusion of cohesion and digital cosmopolitanism?

The 3rd Singapore Literature Conference is slated to take place on August 7, 2021, a Saturday. The theme of the symposium is “Community." We are interested in papers that explore the theme in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and drama about Singapore and Southeast Asia from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines.

"We don't even ask happiness, just a little less pain"

- Charles Bukowski